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The time when we feel closest to happiness is when we fall in love—as long as it is reciprocated, of course. When it isn’t, we may experience a “broken heart syndrome,” or Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, as it is known in medicine, which affects the muscle of the heart and can be life-threatening. Either way, as everybody knows and love songs constantly remind us, romantic love is the source of many intense and conflicting emotions that are unlikely to keep us happy for very long.

The problem with romantic love is that it often goes wrong. It may be unreciprocated, or betrayed, or it may simply expire, and when any of these things happen, the results are very painful.

More Functional Than Romantic

In the very old days, before romantic love was invented in the Middle Ages by the troubadours of Southern France, love was a rather more functional affair than it is today, and the average young person had a very limited choice of potential partners in their immediate environment, if they had a choice at all.

Once romantic love was invented, things got more complicated. To be fair, one has to assume that it already had existed to some extent before the troubadours, even if other more practical considerations often governed the affections between young people. Romantic impulses seem to be in fact quite deeply embedded into our human blueprint. There is, however, one aspect of love that is relatively new and that has created significant problems for us: This is the concept of "The One," or the belief that there is only one single and unique soulmate out there for each one of us, our own and specific "half-orange," as the Spanish say.

The One

The romantic idea of the soulmate is apparently beautiful, but it is also wrong, and even counterproductive, unless it is understood as someone who has become our soulmate through their love and devotion, and by working hard at making sure that the relationship is successful. In other words, the status of soulmate is something to be achieved during the relationship. A soulmate isn't a single and unique person who complements us perfectly and who we must find if we hope to be happy one day. In reality, there are—for any of us—a number of potential soulmates out there.

Unrequited Love

Love is considerably less specific than what romantic songs may suggest. Bearing this in mind will help us when our love is unreciprocated or betrayed. He or she wasn't really our soulmate (they didn't earn the title), and others better qualified to eventually become our soulmate are out there, waiting to meet us.